In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was first forced to use Google Meet to speak with a few teams, I was seriously underwhelmed. The reason was quite simple: the product barely worked. I’m not talking about weaknesses in fringe features but literally, the audio and video did not work reliably. Although my regular browser is Firefox, I used Google Chrome to load Google Meet, surmising that staying withing the native Google ecosystem would result in good performance. Switching browsers made absolutely no difference. The video quality was so bad that only the person actively speaking would come through in a badly artifacted feed; everyone else would be frozen or turn into a black rectangle. I couldn’t see why anyone would suffer through this terrible experience that was not only worse than Zoom, but worse than WebEx, GoToMeeting, or even (gasp) Verizon BlueJeans. (It takes real effort to make software that’s worse than what a telco can provide.)
Because of my poor initial experience with Google Meet, I cringed when first joining Chainguard – a company founded by ex-Google employees who have naturally standardized on all things Google. But six months into using Google Meet, not only am I tolerant of it, I’m actually a huge fan. I’m now a fan to the point where I think Google Meet – and Microsoft Teams – will be the ultimate winners in enterprise videoconferencing. Zoom, I’m afraid, is going to fall by the wayside and die a slow death as both a product and a company.
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